Show HN: Predict Your 5k, 10k, Half-Marathon and Marathon Race Times
racepredictions.com
racepredictions.com
This was built using Ruby on Rails and is running on Heroku. The biggest challenges for me were:
- Connecting to an API (Strava) and consuming the data
- Figuring out how to efficiently use Sidekiq (especially on a single Heroku dyno)
- Design (this is still a work-in-process)
If it's not clear, this is for Strava users only at the moment. I plan on adding additional API access when I can find them. There are also a few more prediction calculations that I would like to include as well.
Also, it keeps refreshing the page. How long will it take to calculate a "final" prediction?
My worker ran out of memory, so sidekiq wasn't completing your predictions. I just restarted it and it looks like everything is caught up now. It normally should only refresh once and then your predictions would be ready.
This is the problem I keep having - my sidekiq worker runs out of memory and basically stops processing the queue.
* Most runs are training runs so they carry their purposes instead of full-effort race simulation therefore predications based on training runs are usually a bit off.
* Having said that, Strava supports tagging runs which are races; not sure if the API can expose the tags but it would be useful to do a past race based prediction.
* Other than race time predictions, another area of interest is to evaluate training quality. A Chrome plugin, StravistiX does some of it but I'd like to see more such as using VDOT based on Jack Daniels' running formula which have their meanings in training.
My thought on the training run piece is that you don't even have to think about which runs or races (or even subsegments of runs/races) are your fastest. Just throw everything into the funnel and out come your race predictions. I'll think about how to use the race tag, because that is available through the API.
Training quality is a big one for me, too (especially with a family). I've actually been working on something similar and much larger than just having race predictions.